So there is this school in Philadelphia that has a laptop program. Unfortunately, it turned out that the laptops had monitoring software on them and, even worse, the school was using the software to check in on kids at home. This led to Blake Robbins getting disciplined for eating Mike & Ikes candy in his bedroom (granted, it does look like some sort of crazy futuristic hallucinogenic pill). This post has nothing to do with that school.

Instead, I want to talk about New York City Intermediate School 339 (they ran out of war heroes and presidents, I guess). This school also has a laptop program. Instituted by the new principal Jason Levy in 2005, the laptop program seems to have saved the school. In 2005, 9% of students performed at grade level in math. Through 2009, the school saw year-over-year improvements to a current 62% of students performing at grade level. Kids are learning how to use word processors and spreadsheets; they’re blogging; they’re engaging in environmental and political activism.

It all sounds great, I think, but Cory Doctorow disagrees with me. Well, not with me… Technically, I disagree with him… Quiet you, this is my blog. He disagrees with me.

In light of the Philadelphia scandal, Cory posted a link to the PBS story with a comment about how it must suck being a kid today and one teacher’s comments he (well, the source) finds particular horrible. To quote from the quote that Cory quoted:

A few weeks ago, Frontline premiered a documentary called “Digital Nation”. In one segment, the vice-principle of Intermediate School 339, Bronx, NY, Dan Ackerman, demonstrates how he “remotely monitors” the students’ laptops for “inappropriate use”. (his demonstration begins at 4:36)

He says “They don’t even realize we are watching,” “I always like to mess with them and take a picture,” and “9 times out of 10, THEY DUCK OUT OF THE WAY.“

He says the students “use it like it’s a mirror” and he watches. He says 6th and 7th graders have their cameras activated. It looks like the same software used by the Pennsylvania school that is being investigated for covertly spying on students through their webcams.

It does sound pretty bad when you put it that way. But it is taken entirely out of context. First, it’s important to note that the laptops are for in-class use only (the kids aren’t taking them home and from the looks of it they might not even use the same one each day). Second, in the segment in question, he demonstrates how they can connect to a computer and view the desktop. They happen to connect to a computer where the student is running Photo Booth to fix her hair instead of working. He explains what Photo Booth is and that the kids use it like a mirror. Then he clicks the “Take Picture” button in Photo Booth. Important to note: he doesn’t take a picture on his computer, he causes Photo Booth to take one. If you’ve ever used Photo Booth, you’ll know this means the screen darkens, a count down appears (3…2…1…), and the screen flashes bright white for half a second. He has a little chuckle, the kid shuts down Photo Booth and goes back to work.

This seems like exactly the attitude I want a teacher to have. It shows he has a sense of humour. But people try to make him sound like a creep. Why is it that every time a teacher demonstrates a sense of humour or creativity, somebody has to give them bad press? Just last week, there were the two teachers who did a reverse (girl sitting, guy dancing) lap dance during a pep rally in Winnipeg. The teachers have been suspended for their innappropriate behaviour. Here, we have a teacher who plays a harmless joke on a student to get her to go back to work and people are twisting him into some sort of pervert or criminal. I read Boing Boing every day. It’s great, but it really can be as reactionary and shallow as Fox News. Getting attacked from the right and the left, no wonder teachers are so cranky all of the time.

Plenty of people aren’t just against the “taking pictures” but rather the very fact that monitoring is happening in the first place. I think it’s completely appropriate for elementary school officials to monitor laptop use in class (particularly on school-owned laptops being used for assigned computer-based work). It’s the equivalent of a teacher walking up and down the aisles and checking that students are working. Who hasn’t had a teacher walk up behind them when they’re passing notes and clear their throat or confiscate their paper fortune teller? Granted, it’d be a bit nicer if students got a little popup when the teacher connected, but I don’t think that is entirely necessary.

Context matters when you’re talking about privacy. When you’re in class, your expectations are different than when you’re at home. The laptops are given (ie: free) for a specific purpose in a specific place. The school can set what conditions it wants on their use.

The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights held a panel today on bills C-46 and C-47, which were introduced into the House of Commons in the last session and would have made it easier for police to get access to ISP subscriber data. The panelists were Prof. David Murakami Wood (Queens), Prof. Lisa Austin (UofT), and Robert Hubbard (Crown Law Office – Criminal). The panel was moderated by Graeme Norton (CCLA).

Graeme Norton began with a quick overview of the relevant changes in the two bills. Bill C-46 would grant three powers to the police: an order requiring an ISP to preserve data (including usage and location where applicable) on a subscriber; an order requiring the ISP to turn over the data; access to real time usage data. It is important that the first two orders would be available on reasonable suspicion rather than the higher standard of reasonable and probable grounds. Bill C-47 would allow the police to obtain subscriber information (including name, phone number, address, IP address, mobile phone identifiers) from a telecommunications provider without a warrant.

David Wood views the bills as part of a larger movement to expand the definition of lawful access and determine who has control over data about individuals. We should think about the effect of our policy choices on other jurisdictions (where one country goes, others follow). He then considered regimes being put in place in other countries, placing particular emphasis where these measures were forced through despite significant opposition.

In the EU, the European Parliament is considering mandating that telecommunications companies retain traffic data (source, destination, date, duration, type) for all subscribers. The measure is being defended as necessary for security, but was raised as a commercial regulation issue. In the EU, security bills must be passed unanimously while commercial regulation bills need only a simple majority. The bill is opposed by Germany and Sweden. In Sweden itself, the police have warrantless access to international phone calls, faxes, and emails. Contrary to Swedish practice (bills are worked until there is consensus) this bill was pushed through on a slight majority (141-138, I beleive). In the UK, the government already has access to a large amount of data on its citizens. It is currently promoting a bill that will grant police access to social networking and online gaming data (at significant costs). 40% of UK citizens consulted were totally opposed (more were moderately or slightly opposed). Brazil has placed monitoring provisions inside omnibus bills intending to combat child pornography, cyber warfare, and cyber crime.

In Canada, the government points to all these developments as support for its policies. It says the measures are needed to comply with international obligations and to compete globally. Norton concluded by stating that this will lead to a chilling effect (citizens will be nervous about legal activities online) and there is a fine line between that and overt censorship. Lawful access silences debate and turns the Internet into just another broadcast channel like television.

Robert Hubbard disagreed with Norton. The legislation is no different from any other criminal legislation that touches on the privacy interest. With only one exception, the legislation requires a warrant. This is the approach taken by all other similar laws. Further, the trends globally are relevant because s. 1 of the Charter requires us to have regard to other free and democratic societies. Canada is actually far behind the curve in tackling this issue. The US and Australia, for example, have had lawful access legislation for over a decade. The United States has spent 15 years requiring telecommunications companies to create the infrastructure to provide access. Canadian companies usually follow the same procedures and use the same technology as American companies and now have all the infrastructure necessary. Canada is just recognizing that fact. Canada is out of step with international expectations, modern technology, and modern society. This legislation fixes that and all it says is go to a judge and get an order for the information.

Lisa Austin took a middle ground between the above positions. Austin said the issue is justification. The Privacy Commissioner has stated that nobody has even attempted to demonstrate that the current system does not meet the needs of law enforcement. There is no need for the increased powers, but this type of legislation keeps getting introduced, why? It used to be about terrorism, then about child pornography, but it is far too broad to really be about addressing these extraordinary crimes. What bothers Austin is the increasing collaboration between public and private actors to track citizens. So much of our daily activities are mediated by these communications companies, they have the ability to track our every move. The legislation is justified in part by the fact that courts already allow the police access to much of this information. However, the reasoning is problematic. The current trend is to justify it based on user agreements which contain provisions allowing the service providers to turn over the information. This is not right: nobody reads those agreements and the terms are non-negotiable. The options to stay offline and not have a telephone are not real options. Should our constitutional rights really be trumped by provisions inserted into contracts by commercial entities looking to avoid liability?

I largely agree with Professor Austin (and not just because she will be grading my essays). I do think that some legislation is necessary. There is a slight inconsistency in arguing that the legislation is not necessary under current law and also that the current law is wrong (though the two points may not actually be connected in Austin’s argument). I have serious misgivings about the contractual argument that is being used to justify handing over this information. Like every Canadian who has ever signed a cell phone contract, I know the terrible frustration and powerlessness one feels when presented with these contracts. The Charter should not be overcome merely by a corporation inserting a provision allowing the government to violate it. But at the same time, the police do need access in these cases. There merely needs to be limits, oversight, and accountability.

People have fought against national ID cards and mandatory fingerprinting for years. This is no different. Absolutely everything you do online has your IP address or email attached to it, but you can be anonymous because it is generally difficult to connect an individual to those piece of information. Any one of the pieces of subscriber information (name, phone, email, IP, etc) is not very revealing, but the fact that they all represent a single person is extremely revealing. It’s not too much to ask that in the majority of cases where time is not an issue the police should have to go to court to get this information (and then leave a loophole for emergencies).

This is a script written in Python that combines two images into a single dual screen wallpaper so you can have different wallpapers on two monitors. It can be run automatically to randomly change your wallpapers at set intervals. It is intended for Gnome users who like to change their wallpapers often but dislike having to create dual-screen wallpapers in Gimp (like me).

The code is very poorly written and relies on a few assumptions: (1) you have a single, writable directory with wallpapers, (2) this directory contains only image files (jpg, gif, png), (3) either your monitors are the same aspect ratio, or you don’t mind some stretching/squishing (though there’s a half-fix if you read the comments in the code), (4) you’re comfortable editing the first few lines to configure your screen layout. This is my first Python script. It’s not terribly bulletproof or feature rich but it does the job. Once I’m a bit more comfortable with Python, I’ll probably write an improved version with more options and error checking.

Edit the code below and save it somewhere (e.g. ~/.scripts/wallswitcher.py) then execute it with: python ~/.scripts/wallswitcher.py

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The Philly Inquirer reports that a 4-year old boy with leg braces was made to remove the braces and walk unassisted through a medical detector prior to getting on a plane. There’s a lot of things wrong with this story, but there’s an angle I think is being ignored: what about the security guards?

Whenever something like this happens (see also, the 8-year old boy who was given a full body pat-down because his name was on a terror watch list) people rail against the unimaginative security guards who mindlessly apply stupid guidelines. Poor security guards.

They are given rules written by some people in a board room with two goals: avoid planes blowing up, and avoid getting blamed when planes blow up. So you end up with a rule saying something like: “Everybody must remove all metal from their body and walk through the metal detector.” It’s easy to sit back and say that, obviously, there should be an exception in the 4-year old’s case. But if you’re the guard, this puts you in a really awkward position. You could be fired for making up exceptions.

It might be argued that the TSA rule-makers intended for some common-sense to be applied by the enforcers, but what good does this do to the guy on the front-line who has to say to himself “Am I willing to risk my job over this?” I’ve never heard of a TSA regulation stating that a guard can choose not to apply a rule at his discretion. It makes me wonder. Could all these horrible applications of stupid rules be some kind of message from the guards? It’s not hard to imagine that faced with a choice like that, the guard might actually hope to bring some attention to the situation by enforcing the rule in the most robot-like manner possible. It reminds me of a section in the Illuminatus Trilogy where Hagbard Celine explains that all workers are unconscious saboteurs, just looking for a way to damage their employers by slavish adherence to the rules.

It’s part of a larger problem with employer-employee relationships: a lack of autonomy. Employees have to be very conservative in their application of rules or they get fired. Eventually, you end up with McDonalds. Every second of the employee’s work day is calculated and governed by rules. And maybe it works when you want to get a hamburger ready in 57 seconds, but it doesn’t work in a lot of other situations where giving the employee the freedom to think for themselves would really help customers.

We think about rules as being a way to protect customers (ie: by ensuring quality service) but what they really do is prevent creative employees from finding better ways to do their jobs. When you take your computer to Best Buy (for the record, I’ve never bought a computer from Best Buy) to get fixed (for the record, I’ve never taken a computer to get fixed), the kid at the store has a checklist he’s supposed to follow. Problem is, the checklist is probably written by a lawyer somewhere with the help of a consultant whose last computer was a Commodore 64. It will address some of the most obvious problems and then say format and reinstall everything.

Every time somebody says that someone should pass a law or make a rule telling employees they shouldn’t do something bad, I can’t help but think we’re asking people to be robots. Rather than try to encourage creative people who understand their jobs and do them well, we’re trying to turn jobs into something that anybody can do. I don’t dispute there are some good areas for regulation, but sometimes you have to come out and say: “We trust your judgment.”

Lately I’ve felt that I’ve gotten too lazy. Ubuntu requires almost no work to get running and I have little to no idea what all the fancy stuff they’re doing actually means. So I’m ditching Ubuntu (on my personal desktop, anyway) and installing Gentoo. For my own records and to help anybody else who has similar troubles, I’m keeping a journal of everything here.

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I just moved across the border from Mississauga to Toronto and I am shocked by the Toronto Public Library System. My first time at a Toronto library, there was a line of about 30 people waiting to check out books and just one employee checking them in. At the same time, there was this inexplicable “returns” desk with three employees at the counter and two more working behind them. It turns out that in Toronto, you wait in line to return books. Luckily for Torontonians, there was this sign:

And in front of the returns desk was a box that said “Book Drop”…which nobody used. In fact, as I waited in the interminable checkout line, several people walked up, looked at the drop box for a few seconds, and then got in line to return their books. Insane. In Mississauga, you either put stuff in the drop box or just left it in a stack at the returns desk. There was no line.

Today, I learned another thing that I just can’t wrap my head around. You have to return books to the same library you checked them out at (I’m not sure what the rule is for inter-library orders). That is just wrong. I will entertain the idea that there is some sane logistical reason behind it (they service a larger city with worse traffic) but together with the whole drop box thing, I can’t help but conclude that the system is just backwards.

The Ideal Library System

Here’s a few things that I think the ideal city library system would have. First, drop boxes. Second, the ability to return a book to any library you want. Third, the library you return it to does not send it back to the original library. There is no sense in having a book have a ‘home’ in a computerized city wide library system. Instead, the system should allocate books so that they are geographically spread out and pay attention to where consumer demand is. This would also encourage a naturally efficient distribution of niche books. If there is a particular demand for certain books or authors in one area (perhaps there might be more demand for Italian authors in a heavily Italian neighbourhood and more demand for sailing books down by the lake) then the book will tend to stay in the area where it is wanted. When a book is checked in, the computer could decide dynamically where to send it. And if I’m right about geographic patterns of demand, it will most likely stay at the library where it was dropped off. This will mean fewer trucks running around carrying books and I’ll have single handedly saved the environment. Go me. Fourth, the ideal library system would have the book I ordered two weeks ago and that was released in stores 6 weeks ago.