Parc Jacques-Cartier

Parc Jacques-Cartier-13, originally uploaded by Nikita Avvakumov.

A friendly (well, indifferent, actually) moose at the Jacques-Cartier park, August 2009. Black flies suck!

The amazing sharpness of the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens:
Original



100% crop

Important story on ArsTechnica

Ars has a story up that should be of interest to practically all internet users. In a nutshell, it deals with internet service providers (ISPs) closely monitoring all data sent or received by a user. It is called deep packet inspection (DPI), and is the equivalent of the post office opening and reading your mail. The story does not touch on this, but such practices are strongly promoted by copyright watchdogs such as RIAA and MPAA in the US and their equivalents in Canada and elsewhere. This practice is very attractive to them, as it results in the ISPs doing the job of policing the internet for illegal content and tracking down offenders. In fact, these agencies are so interested in this that they periodically suggest that such data monitoring should be a legal obligation of the ISPs. This, of course, is preposterous - as, for example, CNET's Buzz Out Loud repeatedly pointed out, this would be the equivalent of holding Canada Post responsible for mail fraud, or forcing a road construction company to police the highways it's built. In Bell Canada's case, however, the ISP appears to be doing DPI voluntarily, most likely to identify whether users who move large volumes of data are involved in peer-to-peer file sharing and, if so, throttle down or shut off their connections either on the presumption that they are involved in piracy or simply because the ISP is unable to adequately handle heavy traffic.

Luckily, as Ars reports, at least in Canada we are not taking this lying down - an internet policy and rights group is raising the issue of Bell's DPI practices with our federal Privacy Commissioner. The group (CIPPIC) does not focus on the inappropriateness of internet policing by Bell, but rather on the resulting privacy invasion. DPI, at least potentially, allows an ISP to reconstruct users' internet activities: sites visited, files downloaded, e-mails sent - practically anything that is sent through their wires without encryption. Thus, even those who do not engage in piracy or any other illegal activity on the internet need to be aware and deeply concerned about this. The internet is quickly becoming one of the most monitored and policed activities of our daily lives, and in many cases the underlying concern is not even (dubiously) noble, but entirely pragmatic - money.

Music

Some new(ish) stuff:
Yoav's debut album Charmed and Strange is excellent start to finish. Still no substitute for seeing the guy in concert, but a great experience in its own right.
MGMT's Oracular Spectacular - bought the album based on their iTunes single of the week "Time to Pretend" and have not been disappointed. "Kids" is the standout track for me.
Gutter Twins Saturnalia - found it after reading a review in Playback magazine. A bit of an up-and-down as they alternate between the two vocalists - one is more to my liking than the other - but very good overall. Favourites - "The Stations", "God's Children" and "Each To Each".
Check'em out!

Good Night, And Good Luck

Just finished watching Good Night, And Good Luck - a disc from Zip.ca I've had since last August (how's that for abuse of the "no late fees" policy?!). It's a serious film, not a date flick nor, frankly, my typical Friday night fare. Despite lacking any showpiece dramatic scenes or, in fact, any typical movie drama, the film sends one off with a lot to think about. The most compelling part, for me at least, was not even the history lesson to which the entire movie is dedicated but the speech that opens and closes it. In the film it is addressed at television, but would certainly apply to any of the new forms of media as well. The gist of it is that all of them - radio, TV, print and the internet - have a great potential to inform and educate, thereby shaping minds, cultures and societies, but instead are too easily reduced to base entertainment. In the original speech, TV networks whose only interest is profit are blamed, but I would argue that consumers of the mass media bear at least as much responsibility.

Well, I'm off to watch a marathon of Seinfeld re-runs...

Quebec City, April 9, 2008 - Spring!

Playing with the new D300

I recently upgraded from my Nikon D50 to the new D300 - a huge step from an amateur dSLR to a "prosumer" one. Naturally, there are tons of differences between the two: many useful and technical, and some just fun to play with. One example - time-lapse photography. You set up the camera to automatically take one or more shots at specific time intervals, for instance to see what's going on at home while you are out (click images to view full size):

Another cool thing: image merge. You take up to ten shots, and the camera merges them into one:

More to come!