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From the mouths of innocents

October 2, 2002 by Michael Boyle

come pearls of wisdom, from time to time. Such is the case with new Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham, never an imposing or overly impressive figure though possessed of an interesting candour. Today he clarified the Canadian position to the current shenanigans between the US and Iraq, however, and he hits the nail on the head: “U.S. Has No Right to Invade Iraq, Canada Says.” Quote: “The further you move the argument away from an actual direct threat to a suggestion that, well perhaps, one day maybe… then of course you are opening the door to a basic destruction of the world order as we presently know it.”

This, of course, is exactly the US policy on this matter. So maybe the most amazing thing is that this piece appeared at all. I’m taking side-bets on how quickly someone else in the administration backs off the positions Graham noted in the article. I say within 4 hours. But even that is pretty much standard for the Canadian government – get one minister to proclaim the true policy of the government while another prepares the speech backing off that policy statement.

Tags: Canadian Politics

Over at Boing Boing

October 2, 2002 by Michael Boyle

, Cory has been wondering if the FUD about potentially open wireless networks coming from the FBI and others is really due to an inner desire to be cool secret agent types. Sounds pretty plausible to me. “Think about this for a sec: Fed cops want to believe that warchalking is going to lead to hacking and cracking and spamming…” [italics mine].

Tags: Boing Boing

I’ve been away for a while

October 2, 2002 by Michael Boyle

but I’m back now. I didn’t actually go anywhere, but life caught up with me and I found myself very very busy and something had to give. Work is busy, it’s a lot of work to raise a puppy, my moonlighting gig at McGill is a lot of work as well. So I took a break to recharge a bit and take care of other things. Now, back to the blog.

To kick thinks off, there’s an OS X conference on now and yesterday they had a Digital Rights panel that was blogged by Glenn Fleishman. One thing Glenn wrote points to something I have been looking at for ages: “Publishing is aggregation. People will re-emerge as publishers. Will Hollywood be the publishers of the future or will someone else?” I think that we’d all do very well to pay special attention to how copyright works for anthologies. It’s a double-edged sword – you can own a copyright on the collection itself even if you don’t own the rights to the component stories (though you must have permission).

Tags: Personal

John Robb

September 12, 2002 by Michael Boyle

on Trust-based Advertising, yesterday. I don’t think this is the answer for all situations (there is no such thing as one answer like that), but it is interesting.

Tags: Media

The big news in Montreal

September 10, 2002 by Michael Boyle

has been the demo at Concordia University. Several hundred students managed to succeed at preventing Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking in the downtown Hall Building, just down the street from my old office on Bishop St. I’ve had a dozen thoughts flowing through my brain on this but nothing that stuck and formed a coherent post. As usual, MJ Milloy has the story, so go over there and find out more, including some interesting opinion.

My thoughts run along these lines:

  • Concordia leadership was insane to invite a former Israeli PM at this time of year. It shouldn’t matter but it does.
  • The demonstrators seem to have a failing grasp of their mission, and of basic justice and freedom in a democratic society. Whatever you think of Netanyahu, two things are true – he was only going to speak, and other speakers on other sides of this issue have been welcomed to Concordia in the past, including Noam Chomsky and many others.
  • It’s almost certainly true that the cops caused things to move from a simple demo to a riot. I have been in many demos, and some riots, and it is clear to me that the cops are always responsible for escalating things.

Tags: Montreal

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