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While we’re all concentrating on Iraq

January 28, 2003 by Michael Boyle

and other big global issues, the Canadian government has been working on deporting refugees back to Algeria. These deportations will happen despite such warnings as the following from the UK: “Alongside the violence committed by the Islamic armed groups over the last decade are numerous documented allegations of human rights abuses by the security forces and state-armed militias [in Algeria], including the enforced disappearances of at least 4,000 people, abductions, torture and extra-judicial killings.”

There’s more and MJ Milloy has the story: One of these things is not like the other. To really figure this out though, we must look at motivations. Obviously the government is trying to provide a reasonable back-story for some other initiative with Algeria – a trade deal or something most likely. They’re trying to deport people so that later on they’ll be able to say, “no, everything’s fine there, look we didn’t even have a problem deporting people!” Find the second generation motivation and you find the way to deal with the issue.

Tags: Canadian Politics

Matt Taibbi poses some pointed questions

January 27, 2003 by Michael Boyle

about the Washington protests the weekend before last. Mostly about how the media so drastically underreported the crowd – saying 30K while witnesses thought it was more like ten times that much.

Tags: US Politics

Check out this oddity:

January 27, 2003 by Michael Boyle

the other day I went to see 25th Hour, Spike Lee’s recent film starring Edward Norton. As I often do, I went to Salon to read the review after having seen it. So the article loads and instead of waiting, I start to read before the photo appears. By the time it does, I’m at the end reading, “Lee is a pro, and he knows how to work with reference, allusion and metaphor: There’s a “Cool Hand Luke” poster in Monty’s apartment…” and then 20 seconds later I scroll to the top, only to find that the photo I skipped should feature that very poster – but it has been blanked out! And blanked out artfully enough that if you weren’t looking for it you wouldn’t know that the photo was NOT true to the film itself. This isn’t that big a deal, but it does make you wonder how widespread this practice is.

Tags: Media

I haven’t read it all yet,

January 27, 2003 by Michael Boyle

but it looks like the whole Survey of the Internet Society in the Economist is worth a look. The Economist has for a long time featured surprisingly good coverage of these sorts of issues – it looks like this survey is no exception.

Tags: Media

The Economist weighs in on copyrights

January 27, 2003 by Michael Boyle

in a January 23 article entitled A Radical Rethink with the subtitle: The best way to foster creativity in the digital age is to overhaul current copyright laws. The article starts out well, but then ends up suggesting that the fair bargain for short copyright terms is to give industry system-wide strong DRM. This is quite simply a non-starter, both practically and theoretically.

Tags: Copyfight, DRM, Economist

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