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News from the Tyee:

Vancouver’s two major newspapers are sponsoring a government-run centre that will tell international media covering the 2010 Winter Olympics about how the province is dealing with homelessness issues in the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside. [...]

News that BC Housing and the City of Vancouver wanted to establish a centre to “showcase the range of programs and services that have been undertaken to address the issues of homelessness” was first reported by Public Eye in November. ”We think there’s a good story to tell about what we’ve done in B.C. for homelessness, mental health, drug addiction,” Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman later explained in an interview with The Globe and Mail’s Frances Bula.

Now it comes to light that six private sector interests — including The Vancouver Sun and The Province — are sponsoring that centre, which is being set up in the Woodwards building and will also target the city’s international visitors.

(Hat tip: Sean Orr at Beyond Robson.)

Big news from Google:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. … [W]e have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. … [A]s part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. …

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. [my emphasis]

It would be naive to believe that Google is making this decision on purely ethical grounds, and we’ll have to wait and see to what extent they actually follow through on this. And I still have a long list of very serious objections to Google, not the least of which is that they have been collaborating with Chinese state censors for years. But I think they are doing the right thing here.

Best wishes to Google’s employees in China. Hopefully they won’t end up paying for their American bosses’ change of heart.

In Spain, every citizen will have a legal right to affordable high-speed Internet service by 2011. That makes Spain the second country in the world to declare broadband access a right; Finland was the first. Several other countries — for example, France and Estonia — have already declared Internet access (but not necessarily high-speed access) to be a human right.

And yet the people who claim to govern us are conspiring to implement a three-strikes regime that would cut off your Internet access if anyone accuses you three times of online copyright infringement. It’s part of an international copyright treaty called ACTA — a treaty that’s being negotiated in strict secrecy, with participants apparently required to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them from telling ordinary folks like you and me what’s going on. (Big business, of course, already has access to all the information that’s being kept from the general public.)

Meanwhile, here on BC’s Pender Island, smack in the middle of the ferry corridor from Vancouver to Victoria, many people still don’t have access to high-speed Internet connections. According to this month’s Pender Post (not online, sorry), Shaw had planned to apply for funding from the federal government to extend its existing broadband infrastructure to cover the whole island, but they pulled out three days before the funding deadline, leaving many residents in the lurch. In fact, in many parts of BC, your Internet options are still limited to unreliable satellite connections — that is, if you can get a connection at all. You could argue that BC is a special case because of its geography, but the same problem hasn’t prevented Finland from guaranteeing its citizens’ right to accessible high-speed Internet.

Oh, and that funding that Shaw was going to apply for? That’s part of a federal initiative called Broadband Canada, which has $225 million to allocate over three years to extending high-speed Internet coverage in Canada. Which is great, as far as it goes — only it doesn’t go nearly far enough: Broadband Canada received a total of $972 million in funding requests, and as we can infer from the situation on Pender Island, even that doesn’t cover the existing demand.

(Hat tip to Slashdot for the first two links.)

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that at least two major publishers are refusing to distribute e-books to public libraries. Macmillan and Simon & Schuster feel that e-books in libraries are incompatible with their business model. The fact that this violates the spirit (and possibly the letter) of the first sale doctrine is apparently not an issue for them. They can’t figure out how to adapt to the modern world, with its computers and internets and whatnot, so they’re doing what they can to prop up that business model against the tide of history.

If you’ve ever tried to use your library’s e-book collection, this probably won’t surprise you. Selection tends to be hit-and-miss, the user experience provided by most e-book vendors is appalling, and both problems are a direct result of content providers’ paranoia about their profit margins in the digital world. We’ve already seen that Macmillan and Simon & Schuster won’t sell e-books to libraries; other publishers don’t do the e-book thing at all because they’re afraid of piracy or too scared of change to see a market in e-books. In some cases, when you “check out” an e-book at your library, other patrons are prevented from signing out that “copy” of the book, which makes no sense at all — except, of course, as a mechanism for content providers to maximize their control and thereby, theoretically, their profits. I can’t even use large portions of my local library’s e-book collection because you have to install DRM-enforcing software on your computer (even for the public-domain e-books!), and the software in question doesn’t run on Linux. Some libraries have found ways around the usability problems, but if the publishers won’t sell you e-books under any circumstances, there’s not much that libraries can do about it.

So much for e-books. Now we learn (if a rumor on Twitter is to be trusted) that Baker & Taylor, the biggest wholesale vendor of library materials, is being forced by Hollywood to sell rental versions of DVDs to its customers, rather than the more feature-rich versions available on the retail market. In other words, a lot of content will only be available to individual consumers who shell out extra cash for their own personal copies. Aside from simply being unfair to library patrons, the studios’ actions here undermine the public library’s role as a sort of community memory, since the extra content simply won’t be available to the community as a whole.

The DVD restriction is not an earth-shaking development — we’re talking about special features on major-studio releases, after all — and it hasn’t been publicly confirmed yet, but if we combine that with the e-book problems outlined above, we see a trend on the part of “Big Content” to screw over public libraries in the digital realm in the name of profit and a failing business model. And when you add a legislative regime that’s moving towards the absurd restrictions on library use and distribution of digital content that we saw in last year’s proposed copyright law, it starts to look like maybe there is a real problem here.

German police have raided the home of the guy who owns the German domain name for Wikileaks, a well-known non-profit organization that anonymously publishes sensitive documents that governments and other institutions would like to keep under wraps.

What’s going on here? Well, it all starts in Australia, where the government has proposed legislation that would impose mandatory filtering of the Internet. They plan to do this by having a state agency maintain a blacklist of websites with content that some government bureaucrat thinks Australians shouldn’t be allowed to see. If the proposed legislation passes, Australian ISPs will be required to block all URLs in the list, and anyone who links to one of those URLs would face an $11,000-per-day fine. Child pornography is, of course, the main pretext here, as it so often is in Internet censorship cases.

Earlier this month, Wikileaks published Australia’s blacklist, revealing that numerous legitimate websites were wrongfully included on the list (which is no surprise, given that there’s virtually no accountability for the blacklist maintainers). Of course, the list also presumably includes some child porn sites; that’s what the program is supposed to be blocking, after all. Which brings us to Germany, where the current government has been pushing a scheme not unlike Australia’s — again, using child porn as a pretext for censoring Internet access. Since the blacklist published by Wikileaks presumably links to child porn sites, the German authorities figure that this makes Wikileaks guilty of helping to provide access to child porn — thus justifying the raids. Wikileaks, meanwhile, regards the raids as part of a broader political struggle over Internet censorship in Germany, and rightly so. Whatever you think of Wikileaks’ decision to publish the Australian blacklist, it’s hard to dispute that the raids are in part an attempt to intimidate opponents of the German government’s censorship plans.

Australia is far from the first country to try to censor its citizens’ Internet access under the guise of fighting child pornography. Nor is it the first to abuse its censorship powers to silence dissent and other legitimate speech: to take just one example, Finland got caught doing it last year. And the raids in Germany are only the latest attempt by the authorities in one country or another to clamp down on Wikileaks. Last year, for instance, in the course of a lawsuit over a different set of Wikileaks documents, an American judge ordered the site’s registrar to take its domain offline — a decision the New York Times described as “akin to shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article.” (The same judge later reversed his own ruling, citing “the futility of attempts to censor information …  after it has been posted to the internet.”) The trend is clear. I think we can expect more and more of this sort of thing in the months and years ahead.

And lest you think we’re immune to this sort of thing here in Canada, please note that we already have a “voluntary” censorship program — voluntary, that is, for the big ISPs that have signed onto it, not for their customers. The program is called Project Cleanfeed, and its blacklist, too, is secret. It’s maintained by a fairly reputable non-governmental organization that is specifically dedicated to fighting child porn, and for that reason (and also because I was more naive back then), I was willing to give the project the benefit of the doubt when I first heard about it in 2006. But having seen the results of similar programs in Australia, Finland, and elsewhere, and the lengths to which the authorities in other countries will go to prevent the dissemination of information they find distasteful, I no longer believe we should give Project Cleanfeed or any other such program the benefit of the doubt.