kbal

I mean it's not just "unsettling" for lawyers. It's a law that clearly has no place in anything meant to resemble a democracy. It ought to be a major scandal that anyone thought it would be acceptable to even propose it.

It almost seems insulting that they didn't employ more subterfuge. Normally when the forces of evil want to advance the country towards totalitarianism they'll be clever about it, as with the previous government's C-63 which would've opened the door for a newly-created regulator to do some similar things specifically to social media. At least last year they thought it was worth the effort to try and look respectable and provide a rationale, a cover story for what they wanted to do.

This one it's just "we hereby grant ourselves the power to install a backdoor for the spies in every Internet service that's available in Canada." Don't worry, it'll be properly authorized spies only — with a few new additions to who gets authorized — and it'll be totally secure. It's like those videos on youtube that exist solely for the purpose of infringing someone's copyright and we're meant to assume that it's legally okay because the description says "no copyright infringement intended." It's the border security bill, no security or privacy risks intended.

There are plenty of other things in there that could more aptly be described as unsettling, where the implications aren't entirely clear to me such as with the money laundering stuff. If they scrap the completely nonsensical part the committee will still have its work cut out for it in evaluating the rest.

Any company that provides Canadians with a service that stores or transmits information ... can be told to install “any device, equipment or other thing."

There are no "safeguards" other than that the devices or systems so installed should not "introduce a systemic vulnerability." As we have all been repeatedly reminded by recent events one cannot arbitrarily add surveillance features to every Internet service without them coming with new attack surfaces that will inevitably introduce new vulnerabilities. That it will be unintentional when it happens is not such a great safeguard. There are many other problems with the bill, but that part in particular is so obviously egregious that I can't understand why there still isn't more reporting that explains or at least acknowledges just how crazy it is.

I thought he was more of a jester for the gammon class.

Sure that would be technically more correct, more tasteful, and less confusing. But some people may not know the words "port" and "starboard." Frequent train users would become accustomed to it soon enough but you'll always have some people from out of town whose first language is not English, and their limited vocabulary is more likely to include "left" and "right." On a utilitarian basis we must weigh their needs in the equation when considering this problem. Then again there are also some people who can't tell left from right either. We could paint one side of the train green and the other red, but then we might have a problem with the colourblind train users' lobby. What's really needed is 15 million dollars and a six-month user experience design study to decide on the best approach.

For all I know Mr. Carney's personal religious views may be of great interest to theologians, but they are not politically relevant in Canada or in China.

The land of smoke, measles, and traffic. It's feeling pretty apocalyptic out there.

There are lots of new Skyrim mods since the last time you played it. Even if that was only last week.

I see no reason to expect that it won't remain officially voluntary.

I believe it is called "clickbait." As in "Click here to find out what terrible thing just happened to which NATO ally!"

I'm mean sure they'll still kill a few people along the way, but they're not going to contribute as much to the downfall of all civilization as they might if they weren't constantly revealing their utter mindlessness. Even as it is smart people can be fooled, at least temporarily, into thinking that LLMs understand things and are reliable partners in life.

I don't think so but I can report that whatever did cause it, it stopped after an hour or so.

This slightly diminishes my fears about the dangers of AI. If they're obviously wrong a lot of the time, in the long run they'll do less damage than they could by being subtly wrong and slightly biased most of the time.