Comments on: Borderline Insanity

By: Giant Media Conglomerates Applaud New Tory Bill Fucking Over Ordinary Canadians at bstewart23

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:20:31 +0000

[...] Federal Conservative Minister of Industry Jim “Fucknuts” Prentice tabled yesterday the bill I mentioned a few weeks ago. And it’s bad. Bad for ordinary Canadians. Bad for Canadian businesses. And, like most [...]

By: Sami

Sami — Sat, 31 May 2008 07:00:16 +0000

Taking DVDs across borders? WTF.

Meanwhile, my personal iPod has no less than 8093 tracks on it – excluding videos and podcasts. How precisely do they plan to verify the legality of all of them? Only a handful have any kind of DRM on them, and some of them have all their information – track titles, artists, albums, everything – in Japanese script. What are the border guards even going to be able to identify from that? 舞台裏, by 劇団四季, off オペラ座の怪人ロングランキャスト盤 [Disc 1]. Legal or not…

Also, to quote a comic I saw recently, I don’t have anything to hide, but I’ve got some stuff I’m ashamed of. Should I really have to expose the boyband section of my iPod playlist to public scrutiny? That’s between me and my conscience in any enlightened society…

By: eldon

eldon — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:45:16 +0000

so i see there’s no mention of the privacy of your home computer in the government’s crackdown list.

bravo for only tackling a hard-to-govern industry with a half-assed job.

i heard about this a while ago and i could only scratch my head.

what is happening to our country that our politicians would cave to the US?

By: Carol Elaine

Carol Elaine — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:08:32 +0000

Aside from all the other stupidity inherent in the new law re: iPods and the like, how much do you trust for these security folks to scan for copyrighted content (which, as you say, may very well have been gotten via bands’ websites, iTunes, etc.) without seriously fucking up your iPod/laptop/whatever the hell else they decide might have the offending files?

Nothing against the security folks, but if trained computer technicians have been known to mess up hard drives, you think I’d want to trust my iBook to someone who has no training at all?

Fuck that noise.

By: bstewart23

bstewart23 — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:56:18 +0000

For real, you guys.

Of course, the outrage over this secret legislation is twofold: one, how the hell was such an egregious trampling of personal privacy ever contemplated in the first place? And, two, how stupid do you have to be to not see that the legislation will be utterly doomed from the start, by the sheer enormity of the clusterfuck which’ll occur just trying to investigate possible infractions?

And how stupid do you have to be not to realize that it’s utterly impossible for corporate legal dinosaurs to even comprehend the cleverness and speed with which tech-savvy citizens will easily circumvent any attempts at snooping?

By: Malle Babbe

Malle Babbe — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:36:39 +0000

You know, you’d think being able to continue to tut-tut at all blockheadedness south of their border would be motivation enough for the national, provincial, and city governments of the Great White North to avoid stupid crap like this. I was just done rolling my eyes at plans for the state police of Texas to check everyone citizenship during HURRICANE EVACUATIONS** to catch folks here illegally (Yeah, THAT’S not going to slow things down…) and they want to go over I-Pods at the Canadian border?

**This is especially dumb considering that the deadliest hurricane in US history hit Galveston, TX in 1900, killing 6,000. That’s Katrina Camille a few times over…

By: Carol Elaine

Carol Elaine — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:21:53 +0000

Ya know, my head has exploded over US governmental stupidity/criminal activities so often that I suspect I may be part Hydra. It’s nice to know that Canadian governmental stupidity is also testing my ability to regenerate heads.