Product (RED)

Living in Montreal, I had never heard of Product (RED) before. I think it's a simply, yet impressive idea.

Since it doesn't ask people to change their habits, it might actually work pretty well, especially in this holiday time.

So how about a (RED) shirt? Perfect for the holiday season!

Hacking Democracy

I have watched this video and I am shocked. Of all the databases they could use, Diebold use Ms Access to tally the votes! It's a joke! Ms Access was never design with the necessary security in mind required for an election. It's a small application to drive development for small database uses. I can only guess what the other companies uses but I hope it's better than that.

I am so glad that my own government choose to ban these machines. These machines are the worst thing that could happen to a democracy of any kind: They do things in secret. They can easily fail. It's hard to prove they haven't been tempered with. It's impossible to guaranty the results.

Yet they were used in 80% of the polls in the US. Why?

Because they are the only one-stop-shop systems that satisfies all the requirements in the HAVA (Help America Vote Act). They also represents millions of dollars in contract for the private industries that supplies them. There is no economic incentive to produce a really good voting machine, and there is little political pressure to ensure that these machines worked as advertised.

They are only there to give the people the illusion of democracy. But there is no conspiracy. It's not malice that gave America those machines. It's a combination of tough requirements lobbied in by the manufacturers of those machines and a general "I don't care" attitude by the elected official as long as the public opinion doesn't change much (no scandals).

As long as people don't care about this issue, big corporation will continue to get multi-million dollar contract to build less-than-adequate voting that fails to protect the will of the people. Someone in the US really new to crack those machines on the night of the election. It may be a federal crime to do so, but if it is the only way to prove democracy is dead, it may be a worthy sacrifice.

"Le Patron" Writing Assistant

I found this really nice French grammatical assistant from the university of Alberta:
"Le Patron" Writing Assistant

It is free to use, and I found it ironic that it's coming from an English university (as opposed to one in Quebec)

Depression, My own little explanation

I get to this subject at least once a year, and it's one topic where I can easily lose my own temper, so I'll try to write a complete explanation of the concept of depression. I'm not talking about a passing condition, a sort of "I don't feel well today", but of real clinical depression. But before any sort of explanation, there is a very nice article on Wikipedia on the subject:
Clinical depression

But the article in Wikipedia doesn't address the common misconceptions on depression (It's not the purpose of a encyclopedia) so I'll try to debunk a couple of those...

First of all, it's not something which can be easily 'fought out' or 'overturned'. It's a condition that slowly drain all the motivation or energy of someone, the very thing required to 'fight' the condition. It's like trying to run with chains attached to both feet. So someone depressive is not like that because he is too lazy, he instead lose any interest in why he should do anything.

Second, a depressed person can be really difficult to understand. Irritability is one of the symptoms and it can make someone very unpredictable. They will get angry or upset for the most irrelevant things, and wonder why they got angry 2 minutes later. Some will have a "I just don't care attitude" which can be a real pain. Others will simply pretend everything is all right, while still acting strange (The "Everything is fine, leave me alone" attitude).

Third, depression may not be because of a particular event, but be rather a large accumulation of smaller more insignificant reasons, or sometime for no particular reasons at all. Stress, strain, loss of sleep, diminution of daylight, etc.: a lot of factors can contribute to a depression, and they are not always visible at first. It is also important to note that it's not the nature of the events, but rather the perceptions of these same event that count.

Last but not least, don't treat a depressed individual like it's their fault. The "It's all in your head" or "Just cheer up" remarks only help to make the depressed one guilty about his own condition, which in turn, doesn't help at all. Social stigma is the worse thing anyone can give to any individual suffering from any form of mental illness.

Of course, this is all from my own experiences over the years... I'm pretty sure there are others I'm simply missing, but I think it's a good start.

If you would like more information on the subject of depression and metal illness in general, see the Mental illness foundation's website

Warcraft Doesn't Have To Wreck Lives... but it does...

And in opposition to the posting I did yesterday, come this one:
Slashdot | How Warcraft Doesn't Have To Wreck Lives

Online gaming is now part of our internet lives. And whatever you do, people will always critic your work. But these dicussions seems to lose sight of the real question that should come out the oppisition of these ideas:

Why are some people wrecking theirs lives in a MMORPG while others don't?

To get a full answer to this question, we need to go back a bit, stand way back and examine the problem from a more historical perspective.

These MMORPG, when you come down to it, are simple games. A pretending game with a set of rules in a fictionnal universe. Just like D&D, or Warhammer 40000 from a couple of year ago. People have wreck their own live with theses games also, but on a smaller scale. Technology brought better immersion into the game, as well as lowered the bar for the rules of the game. Thus, with online gaming (in the form of MMORPG), every problem that has existed in the past in the form of a table-top game, becomes much worse.

Even worse, most of theses onlines games are made to give the player easy and tangible rewards. While, it does tend to make the game more fun, it does keep players hooked ("just one more... ").

But the biggest problem, table-top, real live, or online is that the responsability of playing responsably falls in the hand of the player. If the game is engineered, by choise or by chance, to keep the player hooked, it can become like a form a addiction.

A good life, is a well balanced life. Everthing can become an addiction or a obsession, but when taken with a responsible mind, it's all good.

Soul Kerfuffle: The View From the Top

This got posted on slashdot (and Digged also), but I still think it's a worthy read:
Soul Kerfuffle: The View From the Top

It's basicly a story how an MMORPG can ruin lives...

But I think, if you spend this much time in a game, you problem have a problem with priorities or are trying to compansate for a bigger problem.

It's an addiction not quite unlike gambling. Except in this case, you don't get the same kind of reward. But, as with gambling, you cannot 'win' the game...

You have to kept in the mind, that it is just a game, and only a game... nothing more...

Defective by Design's Day Against DRM

From Micheal Geist's Blog:

Defective by Design's Day Against DRM: "October 3rd is Defective by Design's Day Against DRM . The group has compiled a list of hundreds of things that people can do to address the issue. There are several Canadian activities planned. At the conclusion of my 30 Days of DRM series, I provided a list of 30 things that people can do about the threat of DRM and anti-circumvention legislation."

I don't support the idea of DRM, because it simply doesn't work. I can easily understand why the content distributers want this sort of protection on the content, but it simply puts limits on material than real criminal will find ways to circumvent.

DRM is sort of like the idea of Crypto, but the problem is that the recipient of the content is also the same one you are trying to protect the content from. Like protecting a candy jar from a kid. The end result, is that you have to design a system based on the activity of the recipient, and thus, you wind up stopping legitimate activities because they are, from the perspective of the DRM system, indiscernible from bad activities.

The end result, is a set of arbitrary restrictions, based on the best interest of the content distributer, not the consumer nor the content creator.

If you don't believe me, you can read it directly from the artists mouth, from the Canadian Music Creators Coalition's 'what we stand for' page...

Apple Estate pictures

We went to an apple estate this weekend, just south of the city. And while we forgot to bring a camera, I found a couple of old pictures from 2003. This one is the view from up in mountain in the back of the estate. I'll try to bring a camera next time and post more pictures. 

This morning

This is an eerie fog this morning. It's quite rare this see a fog in these parts. And after wednesday's shooting, it does make a strange coincidence.

I had a couple of posting about security I wrote while taking the bus to work this week. I have them right beside me, but i'm not in the mood. The events on wednesday killed my all my intentions.

To see my hometown live on every major TV network in North America live for 4 hours and for a school shooting was quite disheartening.

Here almost everyone had the same reaction it's Polytechnique all over again.

By the time this will be posted, the fog will be gone. Just like the shock from the event will eventually fade away. Life will carry on. But we will never forget.

Changed the title

There!

I changed the title because I received comments about how it was a bit confusing, and I think the new one is bit better.

If I kept things static, life would be boring anyway.