Rich's Random Thoughts

Like flossing your teeth, keeping track of your all your user accounts, passwords and digital assets is not easy to remember to do.  So why is it important to keep an organized record of information like this, when you can simply keep it all in your head?  Because if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, you want someone close to you to be able to access all this information in order to wind up your affairs and pass along your digital legacy to people who are important to you.

What digital assests are we talking about?  Things like:

• Online Account Information: Facebook, Blog’s, websites, Email, and Shopping sites.
• Hardware: including computers, thumb drives, backup drives and DVD’s… Any hardware that you have personal data stored on.

What got me thinking about this?  I saw a thought provoking article on the American Bar Association’s web site, called Estate Planning for your Digital Assets, by Dennis Kennedy.  Here are 3 important steps taken out of his somewhat lengthy article:

Step 1. Inventory Your Digital Assets: After the inventory is complete, put the list (including user names and passwords) in a secure place, possibly in a safety deposit box along with your will.

Step 2. Identify Appropriate Help: Let one or more people know about your inventory, so they know it exists and where to look for it when it will be needed.

Step 3. Provide Instructions:  You may want friends on social networks like Facebook or Twitter to be notified of your passing.  Make sure you’ve provided a message to post (along with the passwords you’ve already written down). You may want to close up your blog with a parting message, or pass along specific information to individuals (like photos or journals).

Introduction to the Survey Results

In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic law students over the past seven years, we decided to ask some extra questions about the increasing important mobile technology that students are arriving at Law School equipped with.  One major change to the methodology of this survey compared to past years is that we sent the survey to all students at the law school, not just first year students.  The response rate was 25% this year rather than close to 100% in previous years.

[Note: if you have problems seeing any graphs on this page, please look at the underlying Google Doc's page for this blog post]

Executive Summary:

• 30% of students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet.
• 97% of students own laptops, and over 60% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 39% of student laptops are Mac’s.
• The average laptop price dropped to $1,200 from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• All students now report having high speed internet in their homes.
• 82% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 86% of students own MP3 players capable of listening to recorded lectures.
• 54% of students use Gmail as their primary email account, 18% use UVic email and 15% Hotmail.
• 58% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing.  27% chose Google Docs, 5% OpenOffice Writer & 10% “Other”.
• 100% of students now have access to high speed internet at their homes.
• 86% of students use Facebook and 65% of those students would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar of events.

Read more…

Below is the text of a letter that I emailed and mailed (first time I’ve sent anything other than cheques by regular mail in a long time), to Jim Prentice, Gary Lunn (my member of Parliament), and Prime Minister Harper. I was inspired by a BoingBoing post I read this morning.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper
e-mail: HarpeS@parl.gc.ca
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

December, 8, 2007

Prime Minister Harper,

I have voted for the Conservative party my whole adult life, so I hope the rumours that my party is about to introduce a version of the DMCA in Canada is not true. I work in at the University of Victoria Library, so I know how important fair use is for creativity to flourish.

DRM systems do little to protect intellectual property right holders works, and criminalize fair use behavior that most people would consider reasonable. Most people are honest, and want to pay for the digital content they use. DRM makes those digital harder to transfer between devices, and encourages people to look for non illegal non DRM sources for digital content.

Thank-you for your time.

Rich McCue
1813 Penshurst Rd.
Victoria, BC
V8N 2N6

If you are not a geek, you probably have no idea what the head line for this blog post means. If I were a citizen of the United States, living in the US, I would have just broken the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by simply having posted the following jumble of numbers and letters:

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Why you ask… Well, that jumble of letters and numbers is the hexadecimal key needed to decrypt and watch the new HD DVDs. According to US law, because I am publishing information that could help someone circumvent copy protection software, I am breaking the DMCA. The knowledge and software tools to break the copy protection of regular DVDs has been widely known for some time now.

So why would I want to circumvent the copy protection of a HD DVD, or a DVD for that matter… unless I were a criminal wanting to steal the contents of the DVD? There are a number of reasons why:

1. If I want to play a HD DVD on my laptop, there is currently no way to do it unless I circumvent the copy protection and copy the contents of the DVD on to my laptop. Currently there are very few laptops with HD DVD drives.
2. If I want to play a HD DVD on my Linux computers at home I will have to circumvent the copy protection. There are no legal HD DVD players for Linux. If I want to play a HD DVD on my Linux computers I will have to use “illegal” software to do so (using the above key).
3. If I want to play a HD DVD on my iPod I will have to circumvent the copy protection to do so.
4. If I wanted to take a small piece of video to play as part of a class presentation (which is perfectly legal under the fair use doctrine in copyright law) I would have to break the DMCA in order to capture that little bit of video.

The copy protection built into HD DVDs severely limits how and where I can watch the movies. In the case of the iPod, I could pay for another version of the movie so I would watch it on my iPod, but I don’t really want to pay double just to watch the movie on another device. Buying multiple copies of the same movie would make the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) happy though; and richer. Somehow I think greed and the buying of politicians votes are part of this long and sordid story.

In any case, once the hex key had been discovered (The person who cracked the key said he did so in order to watch movies on his laptop), someone posted the key to the Digg.com social web site. Shortly after, Digg received a DMCA take down notice from lawyers representing the group who created the HD DVD encryption technology. Digg took down the posting, but it was immediately posted again, and promoted to the home page. Digg tried to take down all the postings, but by Tuesday evening they had given up. Every single page promoted to the home page of the web site had the offending key in the posting. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, wrote on his blog:

After seeing the hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Kevin and the Digg community know how moronic and unfair the Movie industry is behaving. Real criminals will not be stopped by the DMCA or copy protection. They only hurt people who want to have some choice in how they consume their digital content.

Canada does not yet have an equivalent to the DMCA, but it looks like it might be coming. Michael Geist, a law professor, talks about the “Canadian DMCA” which will probably be introduced in Parliament this spring, in the guise of copyright reform. Write your federal politician, and let’s make sure we don’t get our own version of a very bad law.

Let’s say that the Federal Reserve, as usual, decides that it wants to expand the money supply. The Federal Reserve decides to go into the market (called the “open market”) and purchase an asset. It doesn’t really matter what asset it buys; the important point is that it writes out a check. The Fed could, if it wanted to, buy any asset it wished, including corporate stocks, buildings, or foreign currency. In practice, it almost always buys U.S. government securities.
Read more…