Monthly Archives: February 2012
If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing To Fear
Ah, the mating call of the armchair fascist. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear! You’re either with us or you’re against us!” An all or nothing plea-to-irrational-emotion to swing the debate onto your own grounds. It’s all a load of garbage, but that doesn’t stop people from falling for it. Every time.
The problem as it stands now, is that Canadians don’t just have to deal with John Badopinions in his living room, yelling at the news man on TV that “the country has gone to hell” because of a bunch of “frou-frou, soft-on-crime, liberal pinkos” actually think protecting basic human rights and human dignity means “pandering to the criminals.” No. John Badopinions lives and works in the Halls of Power. He makes the rules now. This is what you wanted, Canada. Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.
If you recall our show a few weeks ago, in the twilight of the SOPA/PIPA outrage, we had Dr. Michael Geist on to discuss Bill C-11, which is essentially the Canadian version of the much maligned (for very, very good reasons) Stop Online Piracy Act. Bill C-11 would treat average Canadians as criminals in order to protect very wealthy, very powerful and very influential media companies from some 15 year old kid in his bedroom.
This is the new criminal. Billy Torrent, pimply-faced and bleary-eyed at 2 AM, downloading the newest episode of some anime or another that he could get on DVD, if only his folks upped his allowance.
Hey, the Conservatives said they’d get tough on crime, and ya gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette (In this metaphor, the eggs are people who are not guilty of any crimes whatsoever and the omelette is the prison system).
So C-11 is awful.
But poised to be pushed through the House, as Harper remakes the country in his own image is another bill, called C-30, or the disgustingly saccharine and patronizingly named Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. Really? Really? God, why not just call it the “Maple Syrup and Hockey For Everyone Because We’re All A Big Happy Family Act”? What, did “Letting The RCMP Spy On You Whenever They Want Just Because We Said It’s Totally Okay And Also We’re Going To Frame The Debate As ‘Think Of The Children’ In Order To Make Our Opponents Look Like Pedophiles Act” not fit into your tweet, Vic Toews?
[You] can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.
-Vic Towes, Public Safety Minister of Canada
So that’s it. That’s the dichotomy. You either support warrantless surveillance of your every move or you support child porn.
You either support the ability for police to get all your personal info: your phone number, your address, your IP address, anything, from your ISP, without a warrant, or you support child porn.
That faint clapping sound you hear is our good friend John Badopinions cheering the government on, bellowing “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from the tree-tops in an attempt to attract a mate. “Way to stick it to those perverts, Vic! I don’t commit crimes, so this has nothing to do with me. I have literally nothing to hide.“
And thus, we come all the way to the top of the roller coaster. Have you enjoyed the ride so far? I wanted this to be fun; a bit of a different experience from my usual blog submissions. Are you ready? Here’s the drop. (You ARE tall enough to be on this ride, yes? I hope so!)
EVERYONE HAS SOMETHING TO HIDE. IT DOESN’T MAKE YOU A CRIMINAL TO ADMIT THAT.
Here, I’m going to ask you a few questions and I want you to answer them all honestly in the comments:
1. What is your address?
2. Where do you work?
3. How much money did you make last year?
4. How often do you have sex with your significant other?
5. When was the last time you got something for free at a restaurant because your server forgot to put it on the bill and you didn’t correct them?
6. What’s your primary e-mail address?
7. What’s your mother’s maiden name?
8. What are the names of every website with which you’ve registered a private account?
9. Can I go through your mail?
10. What school do your kids go to? And when is their recess, usually?
Rest assured, I do not intend to do anything nefarious with this information. On the contrary, I’m going to use it to make you safer. But you need to willfully submit this information to me. If you don’t answer the questions to my satisfaction, though, or if you don’t answer some at all, I’m going to assume you’re hiding something. And since you’re hiding it, it means you’re afraid. And if you’re afraid, after I just said I want to protect you, you must be the very kind of person I’d be protecting you from! I will now contact the authorities and send them after you. See how it works?
Keep in mind, that I’m actually asking you up front, which makes my invasion of your privacy optional, even if I’m twisting your arm. Bill C-30 wants to move in with you and isn’t even going to take you out to dinner first.
-Ted.
Social Media Reacts to Whitney Houston’s Death
There have been a number of celebrity death hoaxes over social media recently, but sadly this wasn’t one of them. Whitney Houston is dead at age 48. The news immediately rocketed up the Twitter trending charts and stayed there for most of the weekend, though it was eventually dethroned by news of the Grammys despite the many tributes to her during this year’s show. (and at time of writing 8/10 Twitter trends are related to the Grammys).
That doesn’t mean people aren’t still posting about it of course. Until the cause and circumstances of her death are revealed (a good 6-8 weeks from now), we could see it trend a few more times, and with today being the first weekday since the incident many radio and TV stations will be starting their Whitney Houston specials sometime this week. Of course news organizations will also be posting their coverage to Twitter, though in the early goings some opted to get some of their news on the story from Twitter.
It seems normal now that when entertainment reporters want to fill up stories about celebrities dying, they pop open Twitter and see who has posted a message of condolence. While I think it’s great to get leads for story ideas from Twitter, from a news anchor’s perspective it’s a tad boring to play a report that says, “So and so said “RIP Whitney” on Twitter, while washed up has-been #2 added “You will always be missed…”. In the event of a celebrity death, provided you are sure it’s legitimate and not a hoax, social media can be a great resource for finding out what the buzz is and isolating people who might be good to speak to about the death. But it’s the responsibility of news organizations to realize reading tweets (which are widely available to the public) isn’t a substitute for real news, and they won’t succeed in a social or broadcast space with such shallow coverage of a story.
I mean, it’s hard to tell you to go to a reliable news source for information on a celebrity death that you heard about on Twitter (so you know it’s not a hoax) when all they’re citing Twitter as their source!
-PG
Talknowledgy for February 11th, 2012
This week’s show is now available!
Remember you can always subscribe to our podcast here!
Today’s episode includes another social media tip from David Hall of DavidHallSocialMedia.com, as well as a new viral video and much more!
Questions? Comments? Tweet us @Talknowledgy, email listeners@talknowledgy.ca, or leave a comment below.
Enjoy!
P.S. This is the Lansdowne video we discussed in our first segment.
There’s a Social Network For Everyone: Part 1
NOTE: Sorry to those who got the draft of this blog post early. Keyboard error! Hope you enjoy. -PG
As per David Hall’s suggestion, this week I’m reviewing a new social network I discovered via StumbleUpon. It’s called CatHugger.
Not sure I want to hug that cat...it looks angry.
CatHugger is a freemium social network for – you guessed it – cat lovers. There are three levels of membership: ‘Stowaway’ (free), ‘First Mate’ ($25/year), and ‘Admiral’ ($50/year). As you can probably guess from those names, there is a nautical theme to the site. No, I’m still not sure why.
After signing up (for a free account), the first thing I did was upload pictures of my cats.
Of course this post would include pictures of my cats. How could it not?
From what I can tell, there are just under one thousand users but it is well set up to keep you coming back. There are arcade games with leader boards, and on your home page you can see when new blog posts, photos, videos, and polls go up as well as bulletins from the admins. There are also a fair number of resources for users, like cat health tips.
Touching on the games for a moment, I was expecting most of them to be ‘cat themed’ or in some way related to cats but that’s not always the case. The first game I tried was a simple side scroller where you move a cat through various obstacles. But others included a game about milking cows, and another about defending a castle from an army of orcs! (and no, I was not in command of an army of cats).
CatHugger seems well set up for sharing as there are all kinds of submission options front and centre on your “Helm”, whether you want to write a blog, submit a song, or just ‘Meow something’. That being said, the privacy settings do offer plenty of control so if you’d like to restrict access to just people you friend then you have that option (and in hindsight, maybe I should have set THAT first before uploading pictures). The profile customization also seems quite strong, though I honestly found myself a bit confused by it and wish they did more to explain it since I couldn’t seem to apply the changes I was making. Removing widgets and apps was easy enough (though there were a lot to remove, and some of them like “Site Stats” you aren’t allowed to remove) but when it came to colour customization and the like the instructions were non-existent.
I mentioned before the site is ‘Freemium’ and it’s not just the subscriptions you can purchase. They do have a merch store, as well as a “Gift” system that I’m still trying to make heads or tails of. Both of the subscription accounts offer you a set amount of points monthly to spend on cute little pictures and such you can send via their internal mail system to other users. However, it doesn’t explain all the ways you can get these points if you’re a ‘Stowaway’ (somehow I had 5 points) or if they do anything else but buy gifts. When attempting to send a gift you can select points and there’s a greyed out option for ‘money’, and yet you can buy points in the store.
If I had to sum up CatHugger in one word, it would be ‘disorganized’. It leaves too much up to the user to figure out. I discovered after using the site for a bit you’re supposed to set up your account then set up sort of ‘slave accounts’ for each of your cats (and that’s meant to be one of the perks for the paid accounts…the ability to have over 5 cats registered to your account…wait, people might need that???). The customization is great, but also a lot of work. It should be noted that the site is still fairly new, and there are plenty of broken links along with a few spelling errors. I was willing to forgive a lot since there’s this big logo that says “From the Rescue Ship Archangel” which made me think the money they’re making is going to help rescue cats or some such thing. Indeed, they make that claim on their front page…
Proceeds from paid memberships feed and vet the cats of the Archangel Cat Rescue.
…though I haven’t been able to find a website for them thus far. Still, I can assure you CatHugger.com is the finest social network for cat lovers that I have come across.
If you know of any other niche social networks you use or want me to check out, leave a comment or email listeners@talknowledgy.ca! I plan on doing more of these reviews…
-PG
